Sundance Film Festival

When I meet John Lyons in the Filmmaker Lodge, on Saturday Death in Love has only been finished for four days; when they went to do the audio mix the previous weekend, 8 seconds were missing from the middle of the reel. That got fixed, and the film premieres tomorrow. So as nail biters go it was a medium one.

Lyons is here with two premieres, Boaz Yakin’s Death in Love and his first feature as an editor, Tom Kalin’s Savage Grace starring Julianne Moore. He cut Savage Grace first on his Avid Xpress Pro and thought he could live with digitizing at 28:1. “But when I saw it I was pretty sure Tom wouldn’t be able to stand it,” Lyons says. Post Factory loaned him a PC (HP) Adrenaline and he redigitized at 14:1. Kalin also cut—he used the Adrenaline, while Lyons cut next to him in the same room on the Xpress Pro on a G4 laptop. “We each cut half than flipped them,” he says.

With Death in Love, Lyons digitized on an OS9 Meridian at the Post Factory facility in NY. “It had been in storage and they threw it up in the reception area. I would digitize there then take it home on a Firewire Drive.” He cut on the same Xpress Pro system until Yakin told him he only had 7 weeks. “I bumped up to a software-only Media Composer.” Cutting in Yakin’s pool house (glorified garden shed) in Silver Lake, the 24-bit audio started to crackle for lack of ram and Lyons had to spring for a new dual core G4 or risk his director’s sanity.

Lyons who started on Lightworks working for Barry Levinson, then on Film Composers as a features assistant. He bought the Xpress Pro while working as an assistant on Uptown Girls (he could do sound editing and sync at home when his son was a toddler). “The origin of my Xpress system is Jack,” he says.

Tom Kalin, who directed the 1993 Swoon had become a professor of editing and directing at Columbia and made experimental shorts. “I was a little terrified to go to work for someone who teaches editing for a living,” Lyons says, who got the gig on Savage Grace because he’d worked with the film’s production company Killer Films on The Notorious Betty Page. Three weeks in the two editors showed each other scenes. “Tom looked at my scenes and said nothing. And I thought ‘I don’t know how I did there’. About an hour later he called me from his car and said ‘this is going to be fun, those scenes were great.’” At the first screening they blended cuts sight unseen friends and family couldn’t tell the difference.

“ I have no idea how we ended up on the same page,” Lyons says of his collaboration with Kalin. The two had spent no time together in preproduction, or during production (Kalin shot in Spain). “Some of it was looking over his shoulder watching him cut. Some of it was, me just asking, ‘How do you want this to feel? Where do you want this to go? What’s the takeaway?’

“For example, there’s a scene where Julianne and her husband have just had a terrible fight and then have really violent sex. I asked Tom how he wanted the audience to feel in this scene—should it be claustrophobic? Do you want the audience to know Julianne is enjoying it? Yes and ue. So I didn’t use halt the shots the he had given me, none of the wide shots. At first he still thought I should use them, but we didn’t Buy the end of the movie Tom and I could finish each others sentences. After third screening we both knew that the New York section that opens the movie was way too long. I woke up one morning early with an idea of how to shorten it.” But it meant breaking the writer’s Howard Rodman’s heart and cutting a long, exhaustively researched, beautifully written, gorgeous shot where she’s telling the backstory. “It was where wall the money was in the movie, the extras, a recreation of the Stork Club. I took it out and when Tom came in—early for him too—he says ‘the shot with Julianne has to go.’ I said ‘I already did it would you like to see?’”

Savage Grace screens Friday (6:15) at the Eccles Theatre and Saturday (11:30a) at the Racquet Club. Click here for theater info

Next up more on Death in Love.